This proposal is most crucially concerned with life changes and their linkages to physical and psychological impairment. We are particularly interested in whether the occurrence and the linkages of the two sets of phenomena vary across cultures. Our last three years of research have resulted in the development of several scales of life change and illness as well as the collection of a data set which can be used to examine the linkage of and cultural variations in life change and symptoms of impairment. We have conducted a rating survey of a random sample of El Paso Mexican-American, Mexican living in El Paso, and Anglo adults and cluster sample of Ciudad Juarez adults, ages 21-60. Respondents ranked a list of 95 life events and 67 symptoms of impairment in terms of their seriousness. A universal life event scale and group specific scales of both events and symptoms have been developed. The standardized event and symptom scores reflect the weights people would assign to the various phenomena. The ratio quality of the rankings makes it possible to combine the scores in an additive manner or by other concatenation rules. Further, some of our research on paired comparisons of multiple as well as single events suggests that different concatenation rules be used for different groups (e.g., a multiplicative rather than additive concatenation for Anglos). This proposal is to examine the performance of these carefully constructed new scales and scoring techniques in our "Incidence Survey" data collected on a sample of adult from the same cultural groups in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. The major focus in the analysis will be on whether our scale scores will be more strongly correlated with impairment scores across cultures than scores calculated by more traditional means and whether our life event scores are significantly linked to impairment after controlling for the effects of a large range of elaboration variables. We will also consider possible causal linkages by examining time ordered occurrences of events and symptoms. Our data also permit analyses concerning such issues as health personnel use, migration and immigration patterns and status achievement models.